Mar 16: Inside Cardstack This Week
User profiles, Card Reward Protocol & collaboration with Protocol Labs
We are finalizing a few developing threads that bring us closer to shipping new user-facing features.
User Profiles
The team has been advancing the user profile features attached to Card Space, which allow users who have created wallets and business accounts in the Card Pay Protocol to have public-facing web presences under the domain name card.xyz. This profile feature is based on WalletConnect, a foundation that allows users to bypass email address registration to create such a page.
There are only two requirements. Users must have
- created a wallet and interacted with our layer-2 protocol and
- paid a small fee, which is meant to reduce spam and bot accounts.
This page is now fully integrated with a fast-boot server side rendering system, so the links can be shared with other systems dependent on HTML metadata, such as Twitter Cards and Facebook Open Graphs.
We will roll out this feature to all users who have created business accounts in the near future.
Card Reward Protocol
One central element that is important for driving the adoption of any new protocol is creating incentives for users who generate real economic value. We want these users to gain rewards from the network or protocol through a process that avoids the draining features of spambots.
We accomplish this by using off-chain analytics algorithms written in Python to analyze activities that could be considered spammy and catch bots before the reward distribution is committed on-chain.
We are testing this process end-to-end via a retroactive airdrop event, where we use this type of off-chain algorithm to analyze beta users’ activity data. We hope this allows us to distribute portions of the reward tokens in fair ways. This is an end-to-end testing of our Tally-based Card Reward Protocol. It will serve as the first of many launch phases and improvements as we bring our Spend mining and other staking reward functionalities to mainnet.
We continue developing a more generalized analytic architecture, where on-chain data can be extracted from blockchain nodes and where subgraph nodes can be migrated into data frames, e.g. data files that can be analyzed by modern Python-based data science tools. These files are currently stored in centralized cloud storage as part of our testing for retroactive airdrops and other analytic use cases. Ideally, we would like to support decentralized storage of these files, so that, once they are created by an analytic miner running the Tally software, other algorithms can re-use these already-extracted data sets without having to redo the work required by raw blockchain data.
Cardstack Meets Protocol Labs
The Cardstack team met with the Protocol Labs team in charge of maintaining Protocol Labs’ nft.storage and web3.storage services for a technical architecture discussion. We wanted to identify the best way to leverage IPFS and Filecoin stacks to support the decentralized storage of extracted and transformed data sets using the Apache Arrow data frame standard.
The discussion proved very fruitful. We learned how the Protocol Labs team would like us to use their content-addressable storage scheme to provide access to the data set in an efficient way by emulating cloud-based partial object retrievable protocols like S3 Select, which we currently use in our own reward protocol. We look forward to continuing this conversation and collaboration with Protocol Labs to bring modern data science to the decentralized ecosystem.
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